In 2009, the English band the Raincoats, like a lot of bands that formed in the 1970s and 80s, started playing shows again. I saw them at the Knitting Factory, which had just moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn after 22 years: A newly relocated space hosting a newly revived band.

Situations like this tend to be zero-sum games: The excitement of seeing a band you’ve never had the opportunity to see before gets leveraged not only against your own high expectations, but against the idea that you were never supposed to see them-- that you had come to love them as something distant and finite, part of a past that felt more precious because you assumed it would never happen again. I had been listening to their music on record for so long that it had become impossible for me to imagine it being played by human beings with instruments in their hands. I kept telling myself the women onstage were not the Raincoats, but actors hired to play them.

Then I remembered the liner notes Kurt Cobain had written for a reissue of the band’s self-titled debut: “Rather than listening to them, I feel like I’m listening in on them. We’re together in the same old house and I have to be completely still or they will hear my spying from above, and if I get caught, everything will be ruined.”

For the purposes of historical record, the Raincoats are a punk band, but little of what makes punk stereotypically “punk” applies to them.

Something about the spirit of the their sound-- which between 1979 and 1984 shifted from folksy, amateurish punk to something like art-school world music-- seemed inherently private. When they formed in 1977, bassist Gina Birch was living in an East London squat so gnarly that mushrooms grew out of the walls, and in some respects, this is how I’ve always thought of them: Wild growth in a domestic space, strange and untamed but off to the side, between the cracks, in places where nobody bothers to look.

I call Birch the Raincoats’ bassist, but it might be premature. At the time the band formed, she was an art student, and until about two weeks before their first show, did not actually own a bass guitar. The inspiration to start playing music came, in true punk fashion, from watching other people who didn’t know how to play music get in front of an audience and play it anyway-- in this case, the Slits, a mischievous punk-reggae trio whose frontwoman, Ari Up, was only 15 years old.

Birch had seen the show with a Portuguese doctorate student named Ana da Silva, who became the Raincoats’ guitarist. (In several interviews, Birch-- who has described herself as “whiter than white”-- recalls, almost wonderstruck, da Silva’s tan.) Eventually, the Slits’ drummer, a Spanish journeywoman who Clash bassist Paul Siminon nicknamed “Palmolive” because he found it difficult to say “Paloma,” joined, then turned around and recruited a violinist named Vicky Aspinall through an ad pasted on the wall of a bookstore. “Female musician wanted,” the ad read. “No style but strength.”

Punk, especially in its infancy-- and especially in England-- was built on loud, confrontational statements. A sampling of early English punk lyrics include the lines, “I wanna riot,” “I wanna be anarchy,” “Oh bondage, up yours,” and “AHHHHHHHHHHHH.” Disciples of punk wore mohawks, safety pins, brightly colored hair, and whatever else they hoped might get the attention of a society they simultaneously hated and yet desperately wanted to be acknowledged by.

For the purposes of historical record, the Raincoats are a punk band, or an early post-punk band, but little of what makes punk stereotypically “punk” applies to them. They had a violinist. They wore dresses. They were all women but, despite being part of a male-centric scene, never overcompensated by making a circus of either sex or personal politics. Several writers before me have pointed out that their 1979 debut, The Raincoats, sounds less like punk and more like folk song and nursery rhyme played at high volumes.

In a lot of ways, they prefigured an aesthetic that didn’t really take hold until the 80s and 90s with labels like K and Kill Rock Stars: The librarian-punk; radical, educated, but domestic in nature and more interested in building a new world through book clubs and farm shares than tearing down what’s already there. Without them, there are no riot grrrl knitting circles; without them, there is no punk-minded re-evaluation of the cardigan sweater.

While Birch says she learned to play her instrument onstage, the music of the Raincoats is haphazard and intimate, as though the band existed less to perform for their audience and more to be witnessed by them. If the band had to be summed up in a single moment, it’s the joyful opening seconds of “No Side to Fall In”, in which a gang chorus shouts the words, “I am the music inside”-- a moment that applies the catalyzing energy of punk to private discovery instead of public protest.

Between 1979 and 1983, they recorded three studio albums: The Raincoats, Odyshape, and Moving. They also released a live album called The Kitchen Tapes, which I had always assumed was called The Kitchen Tapes because the kitchen-- contrary to, say, the garage-- is a space where I imagine the music of the Raincoats taking place: between the oven and the counter, maybe, like an admirably bold mouse. In 1993, Geffen reissued their early albums in part at the insistence of Kurt Cobain, who adored them, which prompted another studio album, Looking in the Shadows.

The Raincoats is still their best. Only about half of its songs keep a steady beat from start to finish. The rest speed up, slow down, start, stop, and sputter like haywire wind-up toys. Most of the time it doesn’t seem like the band is controlling the music as much as chasing it down and tackling it. It’s the work of children or, if not children, adults who discovered a space of judgment-free exuberance through music-- a space that doesn't make room for command and expertise. “We rehearsed for hours,” Ana da Silva told Simon Reynolds in his book Rip It Up and Start Again, “but we always fell apart.”

But falling apart, or at least the threat of falling apart, is what makes The Raincoats exciting. With every tempo change and precariously structured arrangement, the thread holding the music together frays. As a listener, I feel an almost physiological need to hear Palmolive play one drumbeat at some regular interval after the preceding drumbeat, but this is not what Palmolive-- or anyone else in the band-- does. Instead, they gallop ahead with no clear indication that they will make it to the next chorus, let alone the end of the song. I root for them for the same reasons I reflexively root for underdogs: If you think they might not make it, it’s even more gratifying when they do.

There are times that the album feels less like premeditated music and more like séance captured on tape. And yet few albums are so determinedly planted in the real world. Palmolive’s drums sound like cardboard boxes; Vicky Aspinall’s violin resembles the siren on a battery-powered ambulance. “Fairytale in the Supermarket” is about the supermarket; “No Looking” takes place between two lovers over morning coffee. “Went to fight dragons in the land of concrete,” goes a line on “Adventures Close to Home”-- a line that finds mythical import in someone’s daily commute.

Odyshape is so skeletal and mysterious by comparison that it almost sounds like the work of a different band. Palmolive had quit, and most of the songs were written without a drummer in mind. Birch, da Silva, and Aspinall had professedly started listening to Ornette Coleman and the outer reaches of jazz. The songs have a haunted, spectral quality-- as loose and collective feeling as the music on The Raincoats but to different and more overtly spiritual ends. Scratching noises, howls, and tempests of violin intrude suddenly, then fade away.

Despite the album’s idiosyncrasies, it’s probably more in-step with what other bands were doing at the time than The Raincoats was. By 1981, punk at its crudest and most formulaic was being left behind by its creators for sounds that were, in short, weirder and less white. Like Public Image Ltd.’s The Flowers of Romance, This Heat’s Deceit, Swell Maps’ mysterious collages, or even some of art-rock singer Robert Wyatt’s music for the Rough Trade label, Odyshape is part of a moment where punk energy shifted to what basically sounds like avant-garde world music, cribbing from reggae, North African and Arabian scales, and free improv. It thrashes and wails, but at no point does it rock.

Whether Odyshape is better than The Raincoats or not is something I can’t comment on without bias: There are almost no albums that are better than The Raincoats in my mind. But as a complement to The Raincoats, Odyshape is evidence of how quietly fearless the band was, how capable they were not of bucking convention but of avoiding convention without having to buck, shuck, blast, or perform any other kind of violent verb to it in order to get their point across. Modesty is an irrelevant virtue in punk, but that only makes the Raincoats seem more powerful.

Moving has its highlights, particularly “The Body”, “Animal Rhapsody”, and the seriously catchy but a little one-dimensional “No One’s Little Girl”, the title of which should let you know that they eventually reached a point where they dragged the implicit politics of their music above-ground. Looking in the Shadows is OK, but I often forget it exists; and the Kitchen Tapes is good, too, though unnecessary, especially for a band whose studio recordings have the charms of first takes. But none have the sense of purpose of The Raincoats or Odyshape, which can sound not just like a band playing music but of a band laying out an entirely new blueprint for how music can be made.

Before leaving the Knitting Factory that night in 2009, I bought a button. It is light brown and says THE RAINCOATS on it in shaky lettering. When I got home, I fastened it to my backpack. I don’t carry the backpack often, and even when I do, the button is still too small for anyone to read. It makes more sense to me that way.